No Serious Injuries As School Bus Flips Over On Greenspring Avenue

The Baltimore County police crash team continues to investigate last Friday’s school bus accident that sent five children to local hospitals. (Provided)

A school bus en route to Pikesville Middle School with 10 students overturned last Friday morning on Greenspring Avenue, according to Baltimore County Police.

Five children and the bus driver, a woman, were transported to local hospitals with minor injuries, police said.

The bus flipped in the 10800 block of Greenspring Avenue, near Hillside Drive in Stevenson. No other vehicles were involved in the accident, and the police crash team is investigating. Baltimore County Public Schools will also conduct an internal investigation of the incident, according to a police news release. At the time of this writing, the cause of the crash had not been determined.

“We were driving and the bus just started to turn and slide and did like a 180 and hit a wall or something and then flipped over,” said Charlie Nelson, a seventh-grader who was on the bus.

When the bus flipped, Charlie hit his head on the roof, giving him a bump and causing some bleeding. He went to his pediatrician with his mother instead of going to the hospital.

It happened very fast, he said, and students were scared, but they were all able to climb out the roof hatch after the bus came to rest on the side of the road.

The driver was transported to Sinai Hospital’s Division of Trauma, and five students were transported to Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Pediatric Center and to Greater Baltimore Medical Center, according to police. The parents of the other five students, including Charlie, declined treatment for their children.

Baltimore County Police and Fire got the call at 7:29 a.m., with the first medic unit arriving at 7:37 a.m., police said. The driver and students had evacuated the bus prior to first responders arriving, and no one was trapped on the bus.

Most of the students called their parents on their cell phones, said Baltimore County Schools spokeswoman Diana Spencer, who noted that many of the students said they would still go to school on Friday,

Janice Nelson, Charlie’s mother, got a call from a neighbor who saw the bus flip, and she raced to the scene. When she got there, Charlie was being looked at by medics in the back of an ambulance with another student. She said he was bleeding but was OK.

“It was a very tumultuous morning,” she said. “I can’t believe they got out of there without any broken bones or anything worse.”

Photos show the bus on its side in a wooded area facing the opposite direction of traffic.

“I can’t imagine what got the bus in that particular location,” Spencer said. “It was odd.”

The bus, contracted by county schools through Woodlawn Motor Coach, is about 3 to 4 years old, Spencer said.